Among the numerous changes made by Samsung with last year’s pair of Galaxy S6 flagships, the decision to stick with the Exynos 7420 everywhere the device was shipped stood out particularly. Common practice for the South Korean giant was to manufacture its high-end handsets with Snapdragon chips in the mainstream markets of Europe and the United States, while delivering an Exynos-powered experience in Asia.

Given the Snapdragon 810’s notorious over-heating problems, however, it was probably a good decision; but Qualcomm set to come back in full swing this year, obtaining a deal that sees US-bound Galaxy S7s equipped with their SoC. This, however, seems to have created major discrepancies between the two models’ performances; according to AnTuTu tests, a negligible 5% difference sets the two models apart as far as CPU power goes, while up to a massive 32% gap separates the greatly superior Snapdragon 820 from the seemingly under-performing Exynos 8890 in GPU-related benchmarks…

Battery life is undoubtedly one of the major pain points most consumers have with their smartphones. Because of technological limitations, OEMs often have to find workarounds for squeezing out as much screen on (and off) time as possible, often working on software optimizations or simply trying to fit a larger unit inside the body of the device – at times making it removable.

Another way of circumventing such limitation took form in the way of making batteries recharge much faster, thanks to technologies such as Qualcomm‘s ‘Quick Charge’, which has now arrived at its v3.0. Expected to hit the majority of 2016 flagships, – like the LG G5, which does indeed support it – the latest iteration didn’t however make it to the Samsung Galaxy S7 (and S7 edge), which stuck with last year’s 2.0…

Samsung caused a lot of chatter in the tech scene when it decided to eschew Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips in favor of its own Exynos processors this year. All four of Samsung’s high end devices feature its own processor in every market worldwide. But that could change next year. According to a few leaks posted to Chinese social network, weibo, Qualcomm has sent a few different versions of its Snapdragon 820 processor to Samsung for testing in its Galaxy S7.

I won’t lie, in recent months I’ve found the traditional flagship smartphone market decidedly boring. Although phones from the likes of LG, Samsung, HTC and Sony are all steadily improving all they time and — by all accounts — are very good phones, they all cost a small fortune. The price of flagships from the “big” manufacturers can be anywhere between $500-$900, which is a heck of a lot to spend on a small pocket computer. With the prices steadily rising, it’s created the perfect opportunity for smaller companies to take advantage and release great devices that cost less. In my mind, if it’s below $400 full retail, has a full HD (or better) display and an octa-core processor, that makes it a flagship killing, disruptive smartphone…

In a blog post this morning, Samsung has announced that it is mass producing the world’s first 12gigabit (not to be confused with gigabyte/GB) LPDDR4 mobile RAM. It’s based on the company’s impressive 20-nanometer process tech and will enable the company to make higher capacity, faster, more powerful chips that fit into the same space as the current crop of flagship RAM modules…
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Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Note 5 has been leaked in full, showing the device from almost every angle, complete with packaging and compared alongside the iPhone 6 Plus to show its relative size. As you can probably tell from the images, the photos were snapped by a retail worker. A Samsung rep had been in to his store with the two unreleased phablets (Note 5 and S6 Edge+).